Oswald seized the white hand and pressed it to his lips.
"Your hand I must return, but the handkerchief I can really not give you back," he said.
"Then keep it as a souvenir of this hour. But now let us go on. It is quite a distance yet to the forest chapel, and the sky looks really threatening now."
Melitta leaned on Oswald's arm as they followed the narrow path, which led first under beeches, and then through a young plantation on one side and tall old pine-trees on the other side, deeper into the forest. The sun poured its fiery red rays over the low branches of the tall trees; a little bird was pouring out soft plaintive melodies, as if it were taking leave of the sun and of life itself. Then the purple glow became extinct on high; the little bird was silent, and shade and silence surrounded the loving couple. But the shades became darker and more threatening, and the silence was strangely broken by the groaning and creaking of the pine-trees, which stretched and strained their powerful limbs as if they wanted to try their strength to defy the storm that was rising over the forest. And now it began to whisper and to whistle mysteriously in the bushes; dry leaves flew up and drifted along, as if in mad anxiety, before the whirlwind, which beat down the green waves on high, twisting the crowns of the beech-trees as in a wild dance, bending low the tall tops of the pine-trees and starting the whole forest to its remotest depths from its pleasant repose. The pale gleam of lightning shot across the sky, and big warm drops began to fall through the leaves.
Melitta had come up close to Oswald, whose heart was exulting in the storm. Pressing the beloved one with one arm to his side, he stretched out the other one, as in defiance to the tempest-torn sky. "Go on, go on," he murmured through his firmly closed teeth; "I am not afraid of thee.... How, is your courage already exhausted? Oh! it is so beautiful in the stormy, thundering forest!"
Melitta did not say a word; without raising her eyes from the ground, she hurried forward faster and faster, until the forest opened upon a large clearing; and there lay before them the forest chapel, just at the moment brilliantly illumined by the red flashes of lightning. A few steps more and they were under the projecting roof of the cottage. It was built in the style of Swiss houses, and a jewel of a cottage. Melitta quickly walked up the steps which led to the low veranda, took a small key from a pocket in her dress, unlocked the lock, but instead of opening the door she leaned trembling against the door-frame. She was pale; her strength seemed to be gone; she pressed her hand on her heart. Thus she stood when Oswald turned his eyes from the steaming meadow--a sight which always filled him with a peculiar kind of delight--to her again.